Tag: hard work

I hope I might get your attention with this one! This is something important to me and I would love to pass on my findings and ideas in regards of New Year’s resolutions.

Life is a learning process right? It took me a good while but I came to an important conclusion last year.

What if I don’t do New year’s resolutions anymore. Or at least none for the whole year but rather for only a quarter. New quarter’s resolutions!

You might be wondering what this is all about. Let me tell you this:

Of course I tried New Year’s resolutions before. They did work out sometimes, but not as often as I would like. You may know this feeling too: Setting your intentions and goals only to realize after a few months, that you completely forgot about them or that they won’t be happening at all anyway.

There is 2 issues here:

A year is a lot of time! And if you tend to be inpatient (like me), then you might don’t have the patience to wait for the whole year to if see your dream/goal came true. Also: it’s simply frustrating to wait a whole year and hope to somehow achieve all your intentions and goals.

It’s so easy to lose track on it. As I said, there is a lot of time in a year and depending on your goal, you either lose sight of your goal and the action plan, or your goal is so big that you run out of time and experience stress and time pressure.

I could list more points here but I think those two are the most important ones.

This conclusion lead me to an experiment, which I started this year.

Instead of writing down New Year’s resolutions for this year (2017), I changed it up a bit and shortened the period of time to 3 months instead of a whole year. New quarter’s resolutions!

So instead of giving myself a whole year aka 365 days to achieve any of my goals and plans, I shortened it to a quarter. And who really knows if your goals from the beginning of the year, are still lining up with what you want by the end of the year :). What if you change your mind in-between? Do you understand where I am going with this? 🙂

I felt way more comfortable and less stressed about this idea, so I sat down on the 1st of January and created a list of goals that I wanted to achieve by the end of March 2017.

I came up with 7 main points that I wanted to focus on:

Mediate daily and create a habit of doing so

Do Yoga and/or exercises at least two times a week

Sell a certain item (that I found very hard to sell previously)

Read a minimum of 5 books

Save a certain amount of money

Manage a certain stretch/yoga pose (“hug”)

Start writing

After 3 months I can proudly say that I achieved 6 out of 7 points on my list. I didn’t quiet manage that Yoga pose because I got a bit lazy with the practice for that pose. 2x a week wasn’t enough so I only managed it halfway through.

But to be honest: I can’t believe I managed that many points. I know I can be ambitious and all that but to actually see 6 of 7 points ticked of that list? That feels amazing!!!!!!

I officially state now, that this experiment worked!!

So what is the difference here?

Let me get into that for a small bit to explain you why this worked way better for me (and possibly will work better for other people too).

As I mentioned above: the time-frame. For many people it works way better if there is “instant” results instead of waiting for a long while.

If you set yourself a goal that you can realistically achieve within 3 months: Set it! Don’t just think: oh I gonna do that anyway. Actually do set it, because it will feel amazing to tick that of your list.

Don’t be afraid to also mention new habits. Or simply use something that you already do (like in my case the mediating) and keep focusing on it on a daily basis instead of every few days etc. That is the perfect goal too!

Make sure all the goals and plans you write down, are achievable within the 3 months. This will take away some unnecessary pressure and keeps you motivated to keep going.

If you have a bigger goal or a dream in mind that will definitely take a bit longer, for example 6 months or even a whole year (or more years), you can still put that down too.

However, to make it easier for yourself, every quarter you can focus on just a few steps that will lead up to the big goal of yours and will help you achieve the goal/dream step by step. This way you don’t have to put yourself under stress or pressure but still work actively towards your goal. And it will feel amazing to know you actively work towards it.

Sometimes we just need to keep in mind, that we can achieve big dreams or goals only step by step and not straight away.

One thing leads to the other and sometimes the road to our goal will be full of bumps and curvy.

Don’t overlook those obstacles. Follow your gut and you will see, that step by step, you will get closer to your big goal!

The new quarterly’s resolutions will help you focus on the way towards your big goal.

Before you sit down and write a list of your new quarterly goals, make sure you are in a good mood. If it doesn’t feel right at the moment or you are stressed or distracted, just give it another day and write down all your goals, whenever you feel good and motivated.

I promise you: if you stick to this, you will feel sooooooo motivated and happy. It will help you realize that everything is achievable.